Picture of the Week - ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Killer with m.2 PCIe

Monday seems like a good day to start a Picture of the Week tradition. Several package always arrive on Mondays and I have some time over the weekend to think about what to show.

Our first Picture of the Week arrived just moments ago. This is the new ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Killer, an AMD platform that just so happens to have the world's first m.2 PCIe 2x lane port on a desktop motherboard.

Last June at Computex we posted about the ASUS ROG Series products with M.2 onboard and later followed up the news with some tests with the board in a few reviews. The ROG M.2 implementation uses a single PCIe lane so M.2 PCIe drives are limited to 500 MB/s.

The ASRock Fatality 990FX Killer uses two lanes so the throughput increases to roughly 10Gbps. This is enough bandwidth to fully utilize a SanDisk A110 and Plextor M6 m.2, both with native PCIe 2.0 2x lanes. One thing that we really like about this board is the form factors we can use. m.2 has several form factors and the length of the cards are can reach up to 110mm. The ASUS Maximus VI EXTREME that we have can only scale to form factor 2260, or 60mm length cards. The ASRock Fatal1ty doesn't have this limitation. Some of the other ASUS ROG boards don't have this limit but the Extreme has a heatsink that gets in the way, limiting us to just 60mm length cards.

The ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Killer has several other impressive features like the Killer E2200 NIC that lowers latency in games and a very nice Pure Sound audio that reduces roll off under 100 Hz for superior bass response.

2x Klipsch RSW-15 subwoofers stacked

Since the secret bunker is going through a remodel on the home theater side, we might have to give the bass response a test in the blog at some point. I think we have the additional hardware needed to make it happen...all the way down to 19Hz.

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